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April082005

(4.11.05 issue) This week's best piece...

Filed under: Pick of the Issue   Tagged: , , , ,

so far—and I'm well into the magazine—is Todd Pruzan's "Global Warning." [UPDATE: It's now a gorgeously produced paperback, The Clumsiest People in Europe, and at a mere $9.95, how can you resist?

The Clumsiest People in Europe (now in paperback)

But back to our story.] Not a great headline, considering the subtle elegance of Pruzan's storytelling. But if you don't read it, you'll be sorry. Subtitled "Mrs. Mortimer's guide to the world," it's all about a Victorian geography-book and children's-morality-primer writer whose work was incredibly popular, all the more incredibly (to many) because her views were so preposterously prejudiced against pretty much everybody. Pruzan writes, after reading Mortimer on "the habits of German women":


The passage's escalating scorn, with its absolutist damnation of silly women and smoking and novels, actually startled me. Half an hour later, my friends and I sat around our back yard, drinking beer and passing the book around, hooting and slapping our wooden picnic table as we read aloud from the little book's casual condemnations of the Portugese ("indolent, like the Spaniards"), the Poles ("they speak so loud they almost scream"), and the Icelanders "I think it would almost make you sick to go to church in Iceland").

What I like best is that Pruzan, who became intrigued enough with Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer's story that he edited a collection of her writing (due out in June; nothing's even been published about her since a 1950 letter to The New Yorker by her grandniece), begins by mocking her seemingly whimsical bigotry, but gradually begins to wonder what brought her to write as she did and who she was. He praises Mortimer's writing style as "direct, persuasive, forceful," and Pruzan's is that plus; reading this is like lying in a stream and letting water rush over you. It's really funny, too. He sympathizes with Mortimer's considerable trials and shakes his head at her (as he labels it) sadism. Then he goes to the overgrown graveyard, begun in 1322 or thereabouts, of an English coastal town to search for her headstone! Now that's what I call a critic at large.

The only essay I've liked this much recently is Ian Frazier's memoir of hitchhiking and neighbor-gazing in Ohio. Who is Todd Pruzan, anyway? The Contributors page is no help—it's a riddle, reinforcing what we already knew (that he's the author of The Clumsiest People in Europe, which comes out in June).

But what else? My very intimate friend Google leads me safely to the arms of Gothamist, which has a juicy interview with him from last year. Bloomsbury confirms that he's an editor at Print, which fits with his tale of fondling dusty old books in Martha's Vineyard till Mrs. Mortimer's caught his eye.

We may have another Donald Antrim situation on our hands. (That's admiration, people, not stalking; the man has a fiancée [update: a charming wife!], and I have quite a lot to read.) Give this man a three-part series!

Test Yourself for Hidden Bias [Southern Poverty Law Center]

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